


Insert

by gertrudeabernathy



Series: Keyboard [7]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Awesome Sheriff Stilinski, Delirious!Stiles, Family, Lacrosse, Love, M/M, Photographs, Relationship Negotiation, Sheriff Stilinski Finds Out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gertrudeabernathy/pseuds/gertrudeabernathy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“So Dad. You know Derek, right?” he bit out, glaring.</p><p>“Why, yes,” said the Sheriff, making a heroic effort. “Sure, I know him. He is your KIND OF FRIEND from Starbucks, who you and Scott SORT OF KNOW, who came along tonight to watch you play. Am I getting this right, Stiles?” </p><p>“Yes he did, and yes you are,” said Stiles, with a certain refined savagery. “So now I have had TWO actual friends EVER, in my whole fucking life. Isn’t that fantastic?”<br/> </p><p>All this, plus an interesting old photo of Stiles' strange Great-Uncle Stan. Works as a stand-alone too. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insert

Stiles hovered in front of the long side-table with his present in his hand.

It was a strange little photo, from the photo-booth at the movie theatre, of Derek facing the camera with his eyes closed, and Stiles ducking into the frame from the side to kiss him on the cheek. His Dad had really liked it for some reason, though Stiles thought Derek looked blind in it. The Sheriff had asked to borrow it, then had pushed it back this morning across the breakfast table in a little brass frame in a box, without comment. It was apparently an early birthday present. 

Stiles was trying to work out where to put it, amongst all the other photos on the long table. He held it over a tiny gap right near the outside edge of the sequence, next to a fading snap of a great-uncle he had never really understood, half-holding a really magnificent dog that Stiles had adored. It didn’t seem right to put Derek so far from the middle, but then, the middle picture was of his Mom. She was young, with a slightly goofy looking two-year-old Stiles on her knee. In the picture she was laughing and lunging forward to recapture him, because he was trying to wrestle his way out of her arms. His father had been behind the camera.

He looked at his little brass frame again, thinking about the three lucky things that had happened that had led to him having it in his hand. They were:

1\. One Sunday morning, he had run into Derek at Starbucks.  
2\. He had actually scored a goal, in a real game, at lacrosse.  
3\. He had had terrible flu the same week as his dad.

_____________________________________________________________________

When Stiles skipped his Adderall, his brain-to-mouth filter went from “intermittent partial function” to “off”, which was why the Sheriff was looking at him quizzically over the shopping as they unpacked it on the kitchen table one Thursday night.

They had been talking about the few really old families in Beacon Hills, trying to work out if there were any descendants of original settlers still living in the town. They had started by thinking about the town’s oldest houses - and Stiles thought he had whipped past the Hale family (the old house was from the 1890s, way after settlement) without incident. But in discussing some of the oldest, scariest people in town, he had obviously put a foot wrong somewhere.

“OK kiddo. That is the third time this week that you have started a sentence with ‘Derek says’.”

“Oh.”

“One was ‘Derek says his mom told him that she knew old Miss Lambert.’”

“Yep.”

“So that’s the whole story, is it? The allegedly depraved murderer of his own sister, recently downgraded to ‘actually a good guy’ -“

“UPgraded!”

“I meant in terms of how serious a threat he is to national security, Stiles. This ‘psycho’ - your word - “

“When I was a little kid and an idiot!”

“Yes, not even two years ago - this guy, who you and Scott now ‘sort of know’, who lost his mother in a fire, and who NEVER TALKS, was spontaneously sharing a reminiscence about her, WITH YOU, formerly known as ‘the boy who cried wolf’?”

Stiles dropped the four big boxes of juice he was trying to juggle into the cupboard. None of them burst, which was good in one way, and inconvenient in another. “Shit, sorry - sorry!” He ducked down to scoop them up. “I think I forgot to take my thingy this morning, did I say? I’m a bit shaky.”

Now his father had one eyebrow raised. He looked like he might be getting annoyed.

“Do you think I can’t tell when you are playing for time? I know FOR SURE you didn’t take your pills, because you aren’t censoring and editing every second thing you are thinking for once! Why don’t you tell me about the context of this conversation?”

This was where the first piece of good luck came in. Derek had mentioned old Miss Lambert, not while he and Stiles were frenziedly making out in the woods, nor while Stiles was digging shrapnel out of Derek's back with a pocket knife after some unmentionably hideous supernatural battle, but on a sunny Sunday morning when they had run into one another completely by chance at Starbucks. So Stiles could actually say that, and did.

“So you saw him at Starbucks, and sat down to hear random stories about his mother, about whom I am guessing Hale is extremely sensitive and strange - ”

“Why would you think Derek is strange about his mom?”

“I’m extrapolating from his reaction to the one question he was asked about the fire in his interrogation two years ago.”

“What did he say?”

“Absolutely nothing. He wouldn’t look directly at anyone either. He just glared at the wall, till they walked him out of the room.”

“Shit. But - I am not saying I am strange about Mom, but - Derek and I have things in common, OK?”

“OK. I can see that, just.”

“And that Starbucks is in a very old building.”

“A bank, wasn’t it?”

“Yes!” pounced Stiles, “And we were there, and he remembered that his Mom told him that she had held him up to say hi to Miss Lambert, who worked there till she was like seventy, when he was in the bank with her when he was a baby.”

The Sheriff felt a bit calmer. That didn’t sound especially sinister. It sounded messy and true.

“We are kind of friends, Dad.” 

The Sheriff was watching Stiles’ face, and he thought, ‘that’s him pleading for something - but what is he pleading for, exactly?’

“How old is your kind-of-friend Derek Hale? Twenty-one?”

(Stiles might have forgotten to take his pills, and he might have been anxious, but he hadn’t become an idiot.)

“He’s ancient - like twenty-three or something.”

“Ancient!” snorted his Dad, and he dropped it and started to talk about dinner.

___________________________________________________

The next lucky thing - well, it turned out that way in the end - happened at the big game against Henderson.

It was a wonderful frosty autumn evening, with a little light still left in the sky. Mrs McCall and the Sheriff had both managed to get out of working on a Friday night to come and watch, and they sat next to each other in the stands, proud and anxious.

Scott was fantastic out there from the get-go. Stiles - as usual - started on the bench, his face avid as he reacted to every check and every moment of success. Only one other head turned away from the field towards Stiles, when he shouted as Scott scored a second time, and the atypical motion drew the Sheriff’s eye. It belonged to Derek Hale, with no hat or gloves, but in his usual leather jacket, zipped up against the cold.

There was nothing odd about Hale being there, John told himself. Derek had played lacrosse himself, hadn’t he? - been a bit of a star even - and that was only five years ago; and there were other good citizens there, who liked the game and followed Beacon Hills, even though they didn’t have kids of their own playing. Frank Phillips the pharmacist didn’t have kids, or a nephew or something on the team that he could remember, and there HE was, with his second wife, in their matching team scarves… 

Then the field erupted as the Whittemore kid - where were his shitty parents, anyway? - allowed his aggression to get the better of him, and he was given an angry warning by the ref. Rather than wait for him to mess up and get sent to the penalty box, leaving them a man down, the Coach called him in, and Stiles was called up for substitution. Finstock was giving him a little incomprehensible last minute shouting-at, but Stiles looked up to the spot where his Dad always sat, just long enough to catch his eye quickly. His pale face was alight with hope.

“Fuck, he’s such a good kid,” John murmured to himself, then remembered who he was with. “Oh my god, Melissa - I beg your pardon, I - “

She was laughing, and bumped her sleeve against his. “No, I get it. He looks so excited!”

“He ought to look scared. He’s got so tall, lately, that now he’s really too skinny for how hard they play. He’s always black and blue after training.”

“Scotty will watch out for him. God knows he looks after Scott the rest of the time.”

“He does?”

“He drags him through Math kicking and screaming! And I don’t know much about what went on with poor Allison Argent last year, but I am guessing that Stiles was holding Scott together for half of it.”

“Do you know Lydia Martin?” he murmured curiously.

“I know OF her!” whispered Melissa. “She’s the strawberry blonde in Jackson Whittemore’s jacket down there, right? No accounting for taste, is there?”

“More of a ginger, then, wouldn’t you say?” he said bitchily, earning a politely-suppressed bark of laughter from Scott’s mom.

The play was exactly as rough as he had feared and his heart was in his mouth a few times. Once Stiles was rammed hard into the ground by a big kid from Henderson, and quite a few of the Beacon Hills fans were on their feet, shouting something, probably “foul!” - Hale was one of them - but though he found himself up on his feet too, John couldn’t make a sound, could hardly breathe even, until he saw Stiles wearily uncrumple himself from the dirt, and saw Scott drag him up to his feet and dust him off. He was fine. The Sheriff breathed again.

“Scott is pretty tough, isn’t he?”

Melissa laughed. “He never has a mark on him, now he’s grown into himself. It just happens overnight, it’s amazing. Remember what he was like with the asthma? It’s a miracle they survived.”

Then things got fast and furious and there was not much leisure for conversation. The Henderson team were very good, better drilled than Beacon Hills, though they didn’t have any individual players with Scott’s outstanding athleticism. He was almost better than Jackson, these days. Scott’s skill and strength shone unrivalled tonight, but there could be no doubt about the intensity of the effort Stiles was putting in to keep their chances alive, to keep up, shaking off some pretty nasty checks, shouting encouragement, and running himself ragged all over the field to be in the right spot at the right time, over and over.

That frenzied effort was what led to Stiles catching the ball out of the air, despite a way-off-target pass from Greenburg, and immediately shooting and scoring, two minutes from the air-horn at the end. They were just in the lead anyway, but it shored up the margin nicely. 

That day’s desperately dull packed lunch had turned out to be a good choice. He didn’t want to know what the inside of his chest would have felt like now, if he had binned the salad, and gone out with the young deputies for cheeseburgers and fries and shakes. It felt like he was pretty close to exploding with pride as it was. 

John had only caught a glimpse of his boy’s face as they dragged him back into the final chaotic huddle. When Stiles looked up again over the other kids’ heads, the Sheriff couldn’t tell at first who he was looking at, not this time, a grin with almost a snarl of triumph in it - the angle wasn’t right for Lydia, though she was waving, maybe even at him - it looked like -

Stiles was looking straight at Derek Hale, who was standing way over on the other side of the bleachers. Hale’s hands were fisted by his sides, and he was frowning and smiling at once, staring right back at Stiles, his jaw clenching, either to stop himself from grinning like a fool, or just maybe - to stop himself from getting emotional. He gave a very slight shrug, downplaying his own reaction, as if to say ‘big deal, one goal, so what?’ and out on the field, Stiles was watching him and laughed and - so quickly that maybe not one other person saw - he mouthed 'fuck you', and and gave Derek the finger, grinning. John's view was too side-on for him to be absolutely sure, but it looked as if Hale responded by holding Stiles' gaze, and quirking an eyebrow. 

Hale was definitely there to watch Stiles.

They were ‘kind of friends’, because Hale had complicated feelings about his kid.

Then Stiles made another face up at Derek in the stand - a tiny grimace of dismay that meant, “Dad is here and we just failed to hide our relationship.”

And then Derek DID NOT look up and across to where he HAD TO KNOW the Sheriff was standing, not for a second. He didn’t move a muscle and his face went blank.

Stiles ducked back into the huddle.

So: his kid was very, very close to Derek Hale, who was five years older, an adult, and who lived in a burnt-out shell of a house and did either nothing for a living or god knew what, and the two of them had been hiding this information carefully, maybe for a while.

Probably, Stiles and Hale were together.

Stiles was gay, or maybe bisexual.

This had never been mentioned - not seriously anyway - at home.

Then Melissa punched him in the arm and said, “Oh my god! Amazing, hunh!” She was beaming.

She must have been looking at her own stupid, happy, normal kid the whole time, he thought, because she had missed it ALL. She meant Stiles’ goal was amazing. He pasted a smile back on his shocked face, but she asked immediately, “Are you OK?”

“Yes!” he said automatically, startling. “I - amazing!” He sat down hard.

At the end of the game, he picked his way down the stairs, to where Stiles was waiting tensely to hug him, and he hugged him back hard, confused and baffled and full of love and fear.

And he felt Stiles gesturing, with the arm behind his back, any half-assed attempts at deception now abandoned. He was saying commandingly over John’s shoulder, “Come here now.”

When Stiles let him go, Hale was standing there, not looking at anyone, just waiting for something new and terrible to happen. He was tallish, and a striking-looking man, but the Sheriff felt himself fall back in time eight years, to the night when he was standing with a junior deputy in the hospital corridor, watching as old Hal Berenson and the doctor told Derek that his mother, his father, and his young brothers and sisters were all gone, dead, burned up, and that no-one knew where Laura was, and that although Peter might not wake up for a long time, at least his uncle was still alive. Derek had been two years younger that night than Stiles was now. “But Patrick's OK, right?” Derek had asked, frowning and looking around, as though his youngest brother was going to walk up to them any second, fine. The old guys had just looked at him sadly, until he said, “Oh. Right.”

John was not going to attack this person, not even verbally. He wasn’t going to say, “What the fuck are you playing at, asshole, with my child here, with my vulnerable, crazy kid, you damaged, perverted derelict?” John didn’t know he was a derelict, after all. He might work four days a week at the lumber yard in Henderson, these days, for all he knew. He didn’t KNOW that Hale had ever put a hand on Stiles, either. He wasn’t sure he could read Derek’s expression, which had shifted; now he looked very slightly exasperated, like someone who has tried and tried to do the right thing but is completely resigned to being shot by a firing squad because of the way everything has turned out. 

This all took the Sheriff a moment to parse, and then he turned to Stiles, who was standing there looking very tall, and sweaty, and annoyed. Then he realized that, astonishingly, Stiles was annoyed at HIM, because he was staring at - and thus being RUDE - to Derek.

It seemed he was definitely NOT allowed to be rude to Derek Hale, former murder suspect, and current probable child-molester, although, admittedly, Stiles had rarely looked or sounded less child-like.

“So Dad. You know Derek, right?” he bit out, glaring.

“Why, yes,” said the Sheriff, making a heroic effort. “Sure, I know him. He is your KIND OF FRIEND from Starbucks, who you and Scott SORT OF KNOW, who came along tonight to watch you play. Am I getting this right, Stiles?” He thought he was doing amazingly well, in the circumstances.

“Yes he did, and yes you are,” said Stiles, with a certain refined savagery. “So now I have had TWO actual friends EVER, in my whole fucking life. Isn’t that fantastic?”

He was ready to fight, John saw, to defend Derek. Stiles could tell that the jig was up, and he was afraid that in his father’s first shock, he was going to hurt his - his boyfriend. That’s where the sudden ire and the braced shoulders came from. Stiles didn’t seem at all worried about his old Dad, who was getting all this information at least a few months late, and all in one go. The Sheriff slumped a bit. Maybe it was his own fault, for not keeping up. Maybe he was a terrible parent. Maybe he should have been relentlessly grilling the kid, whenever he thought he wasn’t getting the full story. And when had Stiles even decided that he was - ? No, that was a stupid, stupid question. What was wrong with his brain?

“Sheriff.” Now Derek was holding out his bare hand for him to shake. He took it, almost automatically, and he could feel how warm it was even through his glove. As they shook hands, he saw a rueful shadow of a smile on the Hale kid’s face - that was how he was going to think of him, from now on, he decided, not as a - anyway - and that half-smile said, ‘How have you coped with him for seventeen years?’ It was sympathy.

And now sweet straightforward Scott, who he loved, really, really loved, ran up and glowed at him. “Did you see? Did you see it?” He was more-or-less identical to the eight-year-old who had practiced and practiced throwing his skinny friend backwards into the air so that Stiles, who was struggling a bit with swimming, could do a messy somersault into the local council pool for the Sheriff to praise.

John found himself overcome, suddenly, not even trying to not cry. “I saw him, Scotty, you bet! I saw you too! Amazing!” and he bent down and hid his face just for a second in Scott’s shoulder, and when he looked up, Stiles’ fierceness was all gone, and he looked wretched, and he said, “Dad.”

“It’s OK, kid, it’s OK, it’s just - you are all grown up, both of you - all of you - you too, Derek - it’s shocking sometimes, to us, when we are looking at grown people, and we are still seeing these poor little kids in our minds’ eyes, aren’t we, Melissa?” She was coming up, smiling. “It is never going to not be strange, is it?”

“I have to go,” blurted Derek, and Stiles was immediately, openly alarmed. “No, don’t - it’s good, I’m fine, Stiles.” Derek looked pretty shocked himself, but he pulled it together with a visible effort. “Great work out there, Scott. ‘Night, Mrs McCall, Sheriff.” And without another word he was stalking off into the blackness. Scott looked anxiously at his best friend.

“Wasn’t that Derek Hale?” said Melissa, momentarily confused.

“Yes, that was him,” said the Sheriff. “He and Scott and Stiles are kinda sorta friends, these days.”

“Really?” she said. “Stiles, didn’t you used to think he - “

“I was a total idiot back then.”

“Oh. Was he upset about something?”

“He’ll be OK, Mom,” said Scott, to Stiles.

“OK, well, I’ll give him this: he’s got good manners, hasn’t he?” said Mrs McCall approvingly.

Stiles' face took on a studied blandness.

“Yes he does,” said John. “And, he came to watch Stiles’ triumph, so that has to count for something.”

And finally, his kid had the good grace to look a bit sheepish.

____________________________________________________________

The third lucky thing that happened was that, a few days after that, first John and then Stiles got very sick.

It didn’t seem lucky at first, because one night the Sheriff complained of a bad headache, and then the next day he had a sore throat and came home from work feeling terrible and went straight to bed, and Stiles danced around making lemon tea and opening canned soup and feeling needed.

The next day Stiles woke up with the terrible sore throat himself, and a sore neck and a headache that made him dizzy, and it was all he could do to drag two big bottles of water up the stairs and give one to his Dad and take one in to his own room, where he lay in bed all day, forgetting to call the school, feeling worse and worse.

That afternoon his Dad started to cough and cough, although Stiles was only half-aware of it, because he was so terribly cold, and then so hot that he threw off all the sweaty covers, and then cold again, so that his teeth chattered in his head when he limped to the toilet. He was hungry sometimes, but he was scared to try going down the stairs, because his room kept moving around him. His father called out to him from time to time, and then appeared at his bedroom door in the evening, looking ghastly, then he came back to bring him a glass of water and a sandwich, which Stiles couldn’t eat because it was so dry it hurt his mouth, and then when his Dad got back to his own room he started coughing again, coughing for hours, till it gave Stiles the headache from the morning all over again and he whimpered a little, and then his teeth were chattering and he was sweating which made no sense, and then very early the next day, he texted Derek and said, “You have to come, flu, we are going to die” and then he fell asleep.

Within half an hour of the warehouse pharmacy opening, Derek was knocking at the front door with two big full shopping bags. Stiles was dead to the world, and it was the Sheriff who staggered downstairs to find out who had come to persecute them at 9 am.

“Derek.” 

“Sir.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Stiles texted me.”

“He’s asleep, sorry. We’re sick. We are both sick.” He turned away and coughed disgustingly. “Sorry Derek, you had better go, we are too sick for visitors, and you don’t want to catch this, really.”

“I know you’re sick, sir. That’s why I came. I have soup, and a humidifier. And I have a phenomenal immune system, trust me.”

“You brought a HUMIDIFIER over?” 

“Please sit down before you fall down,” and Derek steered him toward the couch. He motioned John to sit, then pushed the coffee table in so that he could put his feet up, stuck a cushion behind his head and threw the knitted rug from the side chair over his legs. In a moment he was back from the kitchen with a mug of hot water with pieces of lemon in it, and a roll of paper napkins and a box to use as a bin. “Just sit there for a minute, please. And cough up whatever you can.”

Derek went upstairs. When John opened his sore eyes again, his cranky, sick kid was on the couch beside him, with the mohair rug from his bed tucked in around his legs and a neck pillow on him, and a nasty-looking orange ice-pop in his hot little hand, which he was sucking thirstily.

Then it was question time.

“OK - who has eaten what and when?” Guilty mumbles about trying to eat sandwiches.

“Who has taken what? - who has had Advil since midnight? Tylenol? Cough medicine? Has Stiles had his normal stuff? Do you have any normal stuff, Sheriff?” Nothing much had been attempted in that line, either.

So Stiles explained that he didn't need his Adderall because he was sick, and got two Advil with a half-serve of heated up Chinese hot and sour soup; and the Sheriff found himself taking his stupid blood pressure pill that he didn't need either, as well as being plied with Advil and a nasty but functional shot of Irish Moss and the other half of the soup, which made a surprisingly good breakfast because it had egg and a little minced lean pork in it. The TV was turned on; an episode of Smash was set up and played - although both Stilinskis fell half-asleep whenever there was talking, and woke up again for the singing. The humidifier was set up on the coffee table between their propped-up feet, to pump out eucalyptus-y steam. 

While they dozed and listened, there was the sound of walking around and things opening and closing upstairs, till Derek reappeared with all the sheets and pillow cases and quilt covers off their beds, which he took through to the washer-dryer.

“Did you wreck my bed?” groused Stiles, twisting round. “I wanna go back there in a minute.”

"Stop whining,” said Derek indulgently, handing him another ice-pop, and feeling his hot, dry forehead.

"How do you even KNOW about fevers and Advil, anyway? You never get sick!"

"I'm sure Derek remembers his mom looking after him when he was little, Stiles," said the Sheriff reproachfully. "ALL little kids get sick."

"Actually, my brother Patrick got the flu A LOT," said Derek, coming around the couch and looking Stiles right in the eye. "He definitely didn't inherit the Hale immune system. He used to like me to sit with him when he was sick, because I wasn't a big talker."

"Sorry, Derek," said Stiles. "I forgot about Patrick. Should I go back upstairs? - Except -"

“Eat your Fla-Vor Ice. I found the clean sheets, so both the beds are changed and ready. I threw the towels from the bathrooms in the machine too, and before I go, you both have to change into clean things so I can wash what you have on. You both smell. Sorry.”

“I think I could make it through a shower,” said Stiles’ dad, abashed. He was feeling guilty for not having gotten Advil into his kid himself.

“Good,” said Derek, pausing the show with the remote. “Go, do it now while you have some energy from the soup. Then you can decide, couch or bed. Do you want a spotter for getting up the stairs?”

“I can manage. I - thank you Derek, by the way.”

When John made his way back down, Stiles was lying with his head on a cushion on Derek’s lap on the couch, and Derek was mopping his brow with a wet, clean, folded handkerchief, which he kept dipping in a little bowl of melting ice pieces. He fished out a piece of ice and cleaned it by holding it in his warm hand. Then he put it to Stiles’ mouth, and Stiles accepted it and sucked away at it till it was gone, then immediately waved his hand to indicate that he wanted another one.

“Is he very dehydrated?” said the World’s Worst Dad, awkwardly shuffling over, and falling guiltily into the side chair for a bit more coughing.

“There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s malingering. You should send him to lacrosse practice this afternoon!”

“Mmmph,” huffed Stiles, “stupid Sourwolf!”

“Now that is a weird nickname, Derek,” said the Sheriff, “How on earth did you end up with that?”

The way both of them froze, it had to be something unbelievably dirty, but he couldn’t see how or why for the life of him.

“I REALLY should go back to bed,” croaked Stiles, and clumsily swung his legs to the floor. He twisted round and looked at the stairs a bit nervously. “I’m dizzy though.”

“Go,” and Derek dragged Stiles to his feet, then pushed him slowly up the stairs with both hands on his back. At the top, Stiles propped and resisted.

“We’re not GOING to my room, I wanna have a shower too.”

“No showers for dizzy people with withdrawal shakes.”

The Sheriff held his breath so he could hear. “But you put out my Batman PJs on the bed, didn’t you? Ha, I knew it. And I don’t want to put them on if I am stinky.”

“All right. You can have a bath, IF you swear on the Batmobile that you will get yourSELF out and dried and dressed at the end.”

“I swear!”

“None of this ‘Derek, I’m too weak, you have to come and rescue poor sick wet naked sexy Stiles!’”

“What, with my Dad downstairs?!”

“Ha!!”

“But what if ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!’” and then Stiles was cackling and wheezing as his slave ran his bath and shut him in there.

John tottered up the stairs, to where Derek sat on the hallway floor with his back against the bathroom door, one hand over his eyes.

“He doesn’t hide anything from you,” said the Sheriff, trying not to be jealous.

Derek gave him an ironic, reproachful smile that John couldn’t quite read. He tried again.

“Stiles never tells me anything.”

“‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!’“ yodelled Stiles, in an even worse attempt at an old lady voice, in the echo-y bathroom, followed by coughing and splashing.

“If you knew how much he needs you,” said Derek in a clear undertone that the Sheriff knew Stiles would never hear, “if you knew, you would be scared.”

“Are you going to sing me a little song?” came the cracked voice through the door.

“No.”

“Can he somehow be DRUNK?” asked the Sheriff.

“It’s the fever. I think he is starting to enjoy it.”

“What are you saying to my Dad? And are you going to read me Jane Eyre?” croaked Stiles crossly through the door.

“Are you EVER planning on getting out?”

“No, because I can’t find my - oh right, here it is. You should read it to me, because I am sick! You’d read me a story if you cared about me!" There was another cracked peal of laughing and coughing. "You’re so mean!”

“Because I don’t want to read you a two-hundred page novel, is what you are saying.”

“Yes, because you are a horrible cranky Rochester, and you are never going to be nice to me. Poor me! Poor little Jane Stiles!”

“Sit down when you are drying yourself, OK?”

“So BOSSY!”

“Jesus. Lucky you,” said John, sidling past him.

“Yep. Lucky me.”

John returned his eye-roll, and staggered into his room, to see that Derek had made his bed with all un-matching sheets and pillow cases. It was a comfort to know he wasn’t perfect. The thing was, though - he knew that Derek’s irony was a cover. He had meant that last part quite sincerely.

__________________________________________________________

While Stiles was still hovering and hunting for a place for his present, the Sheriff unlocked the door and walked in. He said “Hey,” and looked at what Stiles had in his hand.

“Are you trying to fit Derek into the family portrait gallery?”

“I was, but did you mean - was this picture even meant to go on here somewhere? Or should it go just in my room?”

“No. It was for here, if you wanted.”

“I do want.” Stiles was puzzled. This seemed too complicated. “Why do you like this picture so much, Dad?”

“Because his eyes are closed and he looks sort of fake-blind, like in an old movie,” said his Dad, grinning.

“Why is that funny to you, you weird, Derek-hating freak?” 

“What? Because Derek is Mr Rochester, remember!”

“Derek is - ROCHESTER.” Stiles was disbelieving. “Like in Jane Eyre?”

“And you are poor little Jane Stiles!”

“I am who, now? And why have you even read Jane Eyre?“

“I can read, you brat! Hey - you don’t remember that conversation at all, do you?” said his dad, grinning harder. “Do you remember when you asked Derek to sing you a little song?”

“When I what!?” Stiles was stumped - for a few seconds. Then he looked at his dad in horrified disbelief. “Hang on - was I in the bath?”

“NOOOW you remember.”

“Hey - Dad - I have been meaning to say...”

“Are you sure? Don’t you just want to drop a few hints and then wait three months for me to stumble onto it myself in public?”

Stiles’ jaw went slack. “Oh my GOD you are amazing. How do you DO that? This is exactly what I was going to talk about - about why I didn’t tell you about Derek before that night.“

“Or tell me that you were gay, or any other thing in the whole world that I might need to know.”

“OK, shut up now please and listen.” And Stiles perched himself in the window seat with his picture in his hand. “So - you might think that I was in possession of these - hard facts - that Derek liked me and I liked him, and that we were going to be together, and that I - wasn’t all about Lydia, and that I deliberately hid these facts from you for months, because… why do you think I didn’t tell you?”

The Sheriff thought about it.

“You thought I’d stop you doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted - and you were right. Maybe.” The Sheriff had pointedly not looked at Stiles in the car after lacrosse, and had said that although he really, really hoped they weren’t having sex, if they were breaking the law, it had to be at their home, in private, and it had to be safe. Stiles had sputtered his way through a perfectly true denial that he was pretty sure his father hadn’t believed for a minute. 

“Well - Dad - I couldn’t fight you about some stuff I HAVE to do - and I can’t put this strongly enough - I do not get to do whatever I want whenever I want, believe me.”

“Yes, and that would be because of DEREK, wouldn’t it. No, yes - I know who is likely to be showing ANY kind of restraint, Stiles, and it isn’t you. And I know you were afraid I would hurt him - that if I got really angry, maybe I would deal with it through work, and use the statutory rape thing to have Derek put away and to ruin his life. But as if I would publicly out my own kid to the whole town in a court case!”

“Would you even care? - If the whole town found out I was - .“

“It’s none of the whole town’s business, but no, I wouldn’t. YOU seem to care though - you won’t even say the word, Stiles. You know you never do, right?”

“This is part of what I am getting at - I was still not 100% sure what that word was! And - for myself, I never thought you would do that - be angry and horrible - but it wasn’t me who would have been going to jail, was it? And you never know about people.”

“That’s crap - sorry - I meant the last part - you DO know about people, if people trust you, and you tell them what they need to know. You ‘know about’ Scott, don’t you? You don’t have to wonder what he is thinking or what he is going to do. He is not secretive.”

Stiles laughed. “Trust me, he can keep a secret. You have NO IDEA how well Scotty can keep stumm if he feels he has to. People have secrets. But yes, I do trust Scott. I trust him to always look out for me, anyway.”

“But you didn’t trust me, did you? And that was because of the hundred lies you’ve told me, not because of anything I’ve done.”

“Dad - I did trust you. No - I trusted you to still love me - but I really didn’t know how you would cope with Derek - with his stupid face and his stupid leather jacket and his past. But I wildly underestimated you there.” He looked down at the picture in his hand. “What I am trying to say is that part of why I didn’t tell you what was happening was that I was still finding out myself what was happening. And I still keep finding new things out, actually." 

"Really?" The Sheriff looked stern. "You knew a lot more than you said.”

“I literally did not know what the word ‘private’ meant until a few months ago! I had no - referent for it, in my experience up till then. And until about a year ago, I really thought I was mostly about girls, and that it was just my slutty nature that that I would look at anyone and like anyone and want anyone and a lot of the anyones were guys and then specifically they were Derek... but I still vaguely thought that somehow, in spite of the way I actually FELT, I might somehow turn out to be normal - that deep down, somewhere, I really had to be straight.”

“I guess it was pretty deep down then.”

“Yep. I’ve been digging away at it lately, and that dirt is all still gay gay gay, no sign of that straightness anywhere for a while now.”

“For you, it might turn out to be more about who you are in love with, I think. I - think it was, for your mother.”

“Ah. Right. Just hold this for me, will you?” And Stiles bent over and put his head between his knees. 

“Yeah - maybe I should have said something about that earlier, in retrospect. But you know, once she and I were together, that was kind of it for both of us, so I never thought about it much.”

“You never thought about mentioning to your weird son that one of his parents was maybe bi?”

“’Pass the salt, Stiles, and did you know your mother was pretty keen on redheads with lady-parts herself when she was younger?’”

“Oh god, Dad, stop. Unless - is there anything else I don’t know?!” Stiles sat up suddenly.

“I don’t know, Stiles, is there anything else you want to tell me?”

Stiles looked at the little brass frame in his Dad’s hand. “Well.”

“Oh fuck,” said the Sheriff, “what on earth can you be about to tell me NOW?”

“I’ll tell you later,” said Stiles, grabbing the picture and moving the others around. “Here is as good as anywhere.” And he put it in front of the picture of the uncle he had thought was strange, but with the dog he had really liked still showing around the side.

“That was a really big dog that ol’ Stanislaus had when you were little,” said his dad. “You were crazy about him. What was his name - Samson? Or - were there two different Samsons? Because he lived an incredibly long time. Was he a husky or something? He was a great dog. He was so smart - he really liked you.”

Stiles grabbed the picture and stared at it. Then he put it back, carefully tweaking with the angles so that he could see his strange Uncle Stan and Samson and himself and his Dad and his Mom and everyone else and Derek all at once.

“There you go,” said the Sheriff. “He fits right in.”


End file.
